Essay: The atheism killing atheist wiki that Conservapedia spawned

Conservapedia's atheism content continues to rack up hundreds of thousands of page views. And it's flagship atheism article has easily surpassed 1,000,000 page views and may well have received millions of page views.

On November 21, 2006, Conservapedia was launched. On February 22, 2007, the User: Conservative account was created and the editors of that account subsequently created a significant amount of content related to atheism.

The atheist PZ Myers said about the current rifts in the atheist movement: "So deep and wide we’ve separated into two continents."[1]

In 2017, atheist David Smalley has indicated that leftist/progressive atheists were "killing the atheist movement" through being contentious and divisive.[2] Smalley indicated that the atheist movement was disintegrating.[3]

But none of this is going to happen now because the event has just been canceled. The reasons why are complicated, but it started out difficult enough. The atheist community has splintered into a million shards in recent years. There are the atheist feminists and the atheist anti-feminists, the social justice warrior atheists and the anti-social justice warrior atheists. The pro-PC atheists and the anti-PC atheists. There are pro-Trump atheists and anti pro-Trump atheists. Atheists are split over gamergate, elevatorgate, whether we should organize, or whether we should even call ourselves atheists at all. The divisions go on and on.[5]

”

The Journal of Contemporary Religion says about schisms within atheism: "The persistence of internal schisms and regular outbreaks of in-fighting within the atheist movement also ensure that much energy is effectively wasted on parochial concerns and further undermine attempts to establish a genuine sense of group cohesion."[6]

Feminist atheism, fertility rates and the fertility rates of the religious

Atheists have a sub-replacement levels of fertility which is going to have increasing affects in terms of lowering the percentage of atheists in the world population and and in various geographic regions (including the developed world), see: Atheism and fertility rates.

Negative Population Growth (NPG) declared in an article entitled The Rise in Feminism and Its Impact on Population Growth:

“

Rubenstein wraps up his study with the statement: “Three generations of U.S. mothers –suffragettes, Baby-boomers and Me-too millennials – are profiled in this paper. While the policy issues differ, the overarching goals of each generation are similar: these women want empowerment. They want the power to control their fertility, the power to raise healthy children, and the power to compete with men in the labor market. Population reduction is never their explicit goal, yet with each of these feminist waves fertility rates declined amidst a strong economy.”[9]

”

Eric Kaufmann teaches at Birbeck College, University of London and he specializes in how demographic changes affect the realms of religion/irreligion and politics. Kaufmann wrote about the problem of sub-fertility in the developed world in his book Whither the Child?: Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility.[10] Kaufmann is an agnostic.

On December 23, 2012, Kaufmann wrote about the subject of global desecularization:

“

I argue that 97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious.

On the other hand, the secular West and East Asia has very low fertility and a rapidly aging population... In the coming decades, the developed world's demand for workers to pay its pensions and work in its service sector will soar alongside the booming supply of young people in the third world. Ergo, we can expect significant immigration to the secular West which will import religious revival on the back of ethnic change. In addition, those with religious beliefs tend to have higher birth rates than the secular population, with fundamentalists having far larger families. The epicentre of these trends will be in immigration gateway cities like New York (a third white), Amsterdam (half Dutch), Los Angeles (28% white), and London, 45% white British.
[11]

”

Annie Laurie Gaylor is an atheist feminist. She is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Gaylor’s husband, Dan Barker, who heads the organization along with her, is usually the person invited to speaking engagements, despite her longer tenure as the organization’s leader and her many books on atheism.[12] See: Atheist feminism

At a conference Kaufmann said of religious demographic projections concerning the 21st century:

“

Part of the reason I think demography is very important, at least if we are going to speak about the future, is that it is the most predictable of the social sciences.

...if you look at a population and its age structure now. You can tell a lot about the future. ...So by looking at the relative age structure of different populations you can already say a lot about the future...

...Religious fundamentalism is going to be on the increase in the future and not just out there in the developing world..., but in the developed world as well.[13]

”

Kaufman wrote in his academic paper Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century

“

Today, values play a more important role in fertility behaviour, throwing the contrast between religious pronatalism and secular low-fertility individualism into relief. Over several generations, this process can lead to significant social and political changes. Early Christianity’s exponential rise during its gestation period from 30 to 300 A.D. has been traced to its superior demography (fertility, mortality and female sex ratio), which maintained a rate of growth similar to contemporary Mormonism: 40 percent per decade. For Christians, this led to a jump from 40 converts to 6 million inside three centuries. (Stark 1996) Christianity became the religion of an empire and a continent. In the United States, conservative sects increased their share of white Protestantism from roughly a third to two-thirds during the twentieth century – largely on the back of higher fertility. On the other hand, sects like the Shakers and Cathars, which permitted entry only through conversion, rapidly faded from the scene. Demographic religious revival is a medium and long-term phenomenon, but awareness of shifting population composition can lead to political soul-searching and instability well before the full impact of demographic change takes place. This is clear in ethnically-tense societies like Israel, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Lebanon, Cote D’Ivoire or Assam.[14]

”

In April 2010, Kaufmann declared "the rate of secularisation has flattened to zero in most of ProtestantEurope and France."[15] Kaufmann also declared that secularism "appears exhausted and lacking in confidence".[16]
In 2017, the secularization rate in Britain reached zero (see: British atheism). On December 2018, The Times indicated: "The number of atheists in Britain has fallen in the past year, according to a survey suggesting that more people are attending church, albeit irregularly."[17] See also: Desecularization

The prominent historian Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, indicates that he believes Christianity faces a "bright future" worldwide (See also: Global Christianity).

According to MacCulloch, "Christianity, the world's largest religion, is rapidly expanding – by all indications, its future is very bright."[18] See: Future of Christianity

Michael Blume, a researcher at the University of Jena in Germany, wrote about the sub-replacement level of fertility among atheistic populations: "Most societies or communities that have espoused atheistic beliefs have not survived more than a century."[19] Blume also indicated concerning concerning his research on this matter: "What I found was the complete lack of a single case of a secular population, community or movement that would just manage to retain replacement level."[19] See also: Atheism and sexuality

In 2012, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (GCTS) reported that every day there are 83,000 more people professing to be Christians per day, 800 less atheists per day, 1,100 less non-religious (agnostic) people per day.[20][21]

Phillip Jenkins published the book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.

As Penn State professor Philip Jenkins writes in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, predictions like Huntingtons betray an ignorance of the explosive growth of Christianity outside of the West.

For instance, in 1900, there were approximately 10 million Christians in Africa. By 2000, there were 360 million. By 2025, conservative estimates see that number rising to 633 million. Those same estimates put the number of Christians in Latin America in 2025 at 640 million and in Asia at 460 million.

According to Jenkins, the percentage of the worlds population that is, at least by name, Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.[22]

The atheist author and advocate David Madison, PhD wrote in March of 2019: "I remain haunted—and terrified—by what I read on a Christian website, not long after the turn of this century: that by 2025, there will be one billion (yes, that’s with a “b”) Pentecostals in the world."[26]

Kaufmann in an academic paper entitled Shall the Righteous Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century wrote:

“

Ethnicity and race may succumb to liberal modernity, but committed religious populations cannot be assimilated to liberal secularism fast enough to compensate for their demographic advantage in a world of plunging fertility and growing migration. In the end, it is a battle between religious fertility on the one hand, and, on the other, religious decline through the 'assimilation' of religious offspring into secularism. This paper argues that the weakness of secularism and a widening secular-religious fertility gap points toward a religious victory...

The principle of tolerating and 'celebrating' diversity is a corollary of postmodern relativism which opens up space for antimodern religious 'diversities' to take root. If they are demographically-powerful religious movements like Islamism or evangelical Christianity, they will exploit this weakness to progressively erode the hegemony of western secular humanism....

In the Europe of tomorrow, immigration and religious fertility will increase the proportion of committed Muslims and Christians, many from the developing world. It may seem fanciful to imagine a moral conservatism uniting white and nonwhite Christians as well as Muslims against 'secular humanists'. However, a version of this process has occurred in the United States, and it can be argued that the cocktail of cultural relativism, secular exhaustion and demographic change is even more potent in Europe than America. The division between native ethnic groups and immigrant groups is currently more important in Europe, but as the Muslim and religious Christian minorities grow, they will become as important for conservative politicians as the religious Hispanics of America whom the Republicans have so assiduously courted. At some point, it will make more electoral sense for European conservatives to appeal to a trans-ethnic coalition of moral conservatives than it will to stress anti-immigrant themes and ethno-nationalism. The liberal-left will find it extremely difficult to craft a defense of secularism given its investment in cultural relativism, the exhaustion of its secular religions, and its laissez-faire attitude to demographic change.

Standing back from the fray, we can think of demography as the achilles heel of liberalism.[27]

”

Quote: "It will be a century or more before the world completes its demographic transition. There is still too much smoke in the air for us to pick out the peaks and valleys of the emerging social order. This much seems certain: without a new [secular liberal] ideology to inspire social cohesion, fundamentalism cannot be stopped. The religious shall inherit the earth." - Professor Eric Kaufmann[28]

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks declared: "...the 17th century was the beginning of an age of secularization which has lasted four centuries until now; the 21st century is exactly the opposite, it's the beginning of an age of desecularization. Religion is seizing power; they're not yielding power." [29]

Final thoughts

There are editors of the atheist/agnostic wiki who are highly critical of Conservapedia - especially the atheism related web content produced using the User: Conservative account.

Question: With "enemies" like this, who needs friends? If only Conservapedia had more worthy opponents that were far more challenging!

Napoleon Bonaparte said "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." Now that the atheist movement is quite dead and poses no serious challenge to Christendom, I decided to post this essay.

Angry and bitter responses from the "rational" wiki

The Christian philosopher James S. Spiegel says the path from Christianity to atheism among several of his friends involved moral slippage such as resentment or unforgiveness.[30] See: Atheism and unforgiveness

"I'm seriously considering making a CP account in order to try to talk the [ User: Conservative ]. I mean, I detest the man..." - ☭Comrade GC☭Ministry of Praise 20:16, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

"#$@# him. He's a #$#$ of the highest stripe and deserves every bad thing that happens to him." --MtDBogan 20:18, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

On Andy Schafly, the owner of Conservapedia: "He is worse than [ User: Conservative], do not be fooled my his upper-middle class polite persona... I honestly believe [ User: Conservative ] means no real harm to anyone. Andy however is a thoroughly nasty piece of work." --Mercian (talk) 20:38, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Christianity vs. atheism: Triumph of the gospel of love

...a pollster at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, found that adults who profess a belief in God are significantly more likely than atheists to say that forgiveness, patience, generosity and a concern for others are "very important." In fact, the poll found that on 11 of 12 values, there was a double-digit gap between theists and atheists, with theists more likely to label each value "very important."

The survey by sociologist and pollster Reginald Bibby examined the beliefs of 1,600 Canadians, 82 percent who said they believed in "God or a higher power" and 18 percent who said they did not.[31]

”

A message to the evolutionist and atheist Oxyaena

Oxyaena, you wrote: "On long enough time scales anything can happen...".[32]

I am assuming you believe this could happen: Given the much higher birth rates of Christian fundamentalists and the adherents of other fundamentalist Abrahamic religions, the sub-replacement level of fertility of atheists and the fact the secularization rates of France and Protestant Europe are now zero, that given enough time, atheists could be a very much smaller portion of the global population and the religious could inherit the earth. In addition, could feminist atheism, which your wiki promotes, help cause this to happen?

Oxyaena's response to challenge and Conservapedia's rebuttal

"It will be a century or more before the world completes its demographic transition. There is still too much smoke in the air for us to pick out the peaks and valleys of the emerging social order. This much seems certain: without a new [secular liberal] ideology to inspire social cohesion, fundamentalism cannot be stopped. The religious shall inherit the earth." - Professor Eric Kaufmann[33] See also: Growth of religious fundamentalism